Bimodal IT Explained

I am sure you have seen the term “Bimodal IT” in the trade press or in an analyst report, if not you soon will. It is a term Gartner defined in 2014 and is now picking up a lot of steam.

The official definition from Gartner’s glossary:

Bimodal IT is the practice of managing two separate, coherent modes of IT delivery, one focused on stability and the other on agility. Mode 1 is traditional and sequential, emphasizing safety and accuracy. Mode 2 is exploratory and nonlinear, emphasizing agility and speed.

In simple terms, it is business areas, often operating under the “digital” umbrella, which have built or bought their own application hosting capabilities completely outside the control of traditional IT.

Mode one, Traditional IT, has a focus on stability and is very risk adverse. This stability is maintained with the use internal processes which were started based on Industry best practices and fine tuned over years of trial and error. Rigid separation of duty between development and even different types of operational teams. Formal release planning that can require multiple layers of sign-off depending on the perceived risk of the change to the production systems. All of this is running on hardware and software from proven large enterprise vendors who wine and dine the decision makers like they always have with a customer list that resembles the S&P 500.

Mode two operates at the complete other end of the spectrum, and is focused on introducing features to meet customers demand with releases to applications that can happen multiple times per day. Process for the sake of process is the enemy, and will be reduced to the minimal possible steps by the minimal number of people to meet the needs of the client. And vendors are chosen based on peer recommendations and are often purchased with nothing more than a visit to a web page or a quick conversation with a sales rep.

Mode one has introduced automation over time, has some self-service capabilities, but they are often controlled and monitored for all kinds of reasons like licensing that is based on hardware configurations and maintaining the in-house hardware performance.

Mode two is all about automation of the development to operations (DevOps) cycle. Automation and integration are the core principles that keep this mode so flexible and adaptable. Software licensing in this model either doesn’t exist (ex: Tomcat), is just a flat fee (ex: Blaze), or is per instance (ex: AppDynamics). This mode can run the applications and services they are building anywhere. Its is the same number of clicks to deploy the application to a data centre in Hong Kong as to deploy it in house and the client requirements determine the appropriate location.

Today the mode one, Traditional IT, side of organizations still take care of the crown jewels of most companies. That is where the availability and reliability are still valued over the speed new features are added. In these organizations mode two operates at the edge, on the customer side, and has a service layer it uses to interact with the core systems.

Companies are learning that mode two requires a much different mindset than the often siloed structure inside a mode one organization. There is no waiting for perfect, there is no waiting for all the requirements to be documented, its let’s work with what we have and release when the feature has passed our tests. If a release goes out to the customer that has a flaw, the team goes “oops my bad” and fails forward with a fix. There is no constant, every misstep is a lesson, and if you are naturally a risk adverse person this is not the world you want to be in.

As mode two teams mature they will eventually start to work on the core systems of even the biggest enterprises. When that level of maturity happens, the mode two teams will be wise to have stayed on good terms with the mode one teams who live and breathe compliance and learn from their mistakes. The same goes for the mode one teams when they want to introduce new technology or process, they will get the best return on investment by leveraging the technology capabilities the mode two teams have already battle tested in production and use as part of their continuous delivery strategy.

The main thing to remember is that both sides of Bimodal IT know they are serving the same customer base as the rest of their colleagues. They just have different views on what the customer values and both, to a degree, are right.